Enjoyed the hell out of the Diablo 3 open beta, next three weeks are going to be long ones.

The upcoming games (not put out by blizzard) I'm getting most excited about lately all seem to be Kickstarter projects. First Wasteland 2, and now I find this: Shadowrun Returns!(edit: couldn't get the vid from the kickstarter page to link properly so, youtube version)

@Sleestak: Same. I think the wait's the toughest thing about these amazing Kickstarter projects. Though for both Wasteland 2 and Shadowrun the low-mid packages include short stories that I'm hoping come out in advance of the games to whet our appetites.

I ended up contributing... well, let's just say I gave them more of my money than maybe I should have. Dammit, though, Shadowrun is just one of those worldbuilding concepts that SHOULDN'T work, which makes it all the more fun when it does, and I'd love to see more of it. I never actually played the Sega, SNES, or XBOX games, but I have very fond memories of the tabletop game, and fully intend to re-create the first character I ever ran with.

@Flabyo: Woah! Flashback! I was sitting there watching and suddenly the memory appeared in my head of filming my brother playing XCOM and XCOM: Terror From The Deep. I'm pretty sure I filmed other games as well, but I specifically remember filming the XCOMs. Why? I'm not sure. I think it's just that it gave me an extra excuse to be around while he was playing, because it was his computer and I was not allowed near it to play myself 99% of the time.

I'm very excited, now, for Natural Selection 2. I was a big fan of the original Gloom total conversion mod for Quake 2, but haven't played it's successors... It's very close to the sort of game I've been wanting to play and have been idly thinking about.

@FlabyoI expect you're right / hope you're wrong about the kick starter thing, if you follow. I like what it represents, but I completely agree with your logistical and cultural skepticism regarding it... While I'm not any real authority on the subject, my gut tells me it will be a bit like the .com boom - a rising trend of investment that will inflate an imaginary bubble until it collapses. Hopefully the collective experience will establish a wider base of avenues in the future, once some of the failures illustrate what not to do and how to make successful implementations reach as far as possible. *knock on wood*

@Flabyo: I don't really think they are. I'd even go so far as to say that blog post you linked was a bit intellectually dishonest. None of the big kickstarter projects were/are envisioned to have anywhere near the production values of a modern game (Double Fine's original vision was no voice acting, cheaply licensed sprite based adventure game engine, fairly short story), and he's acting like they are, or that the backers expect they are. And note that he doesn't actually bother linking to any of the stories about what happened with Star Command's kickstarter funds, where you can pretty plainly see some huge mistakes that they made (why did they miscalculate how much the Kickstarter rewards would cost them, and why in the holy hell did they think they needed to spend $4000 for iPads and PAX East booth space?).

The vast majority of the kickstarter video game projects are going for fairly lo-fi 2D games, with quick turnaround, for release on PC and mobile devices, not big A- or AAA-level projects. Takedown and Grim Dawn are probably the two most ambitious kickstarter projects from a production standpoint that I'm aware of (Bionite: Origins looks pretty big, too, but that started out on moddb nearly a year ago). Takedown is almost certainly going to be Unity powered, which will take a pretty significant chunk off the development cost, and Grim Dawn's actually been in development for a couple of years and they did the Kickstarter to give them enough money to finish it. Most other kickstarters have had some sort of playable proof of concept demo (FTL, f'r'instance)

I do feel that anyone putting their project on Kickstarter really needs to budget for prize fulfilment. Yes, I think they probably need to NOT tell people how much money the project would have needed if they didn't have to give away t-shirts and posters to everyone. No, I don't think that's dishonest, because that would be just as much part of the budget as $4000 in iPads and booth stuff.

The problem with Kickstarter isn't the model for funding. The problem is that some people (developers and funders alike) are unrealistic about what they're getting into. You get less game for each dollar invested than with a studio (Because they're not asking you to give them fifty thousand t-shirts and a poster) but you get a lot more freedom to produce the game you want to, not to MENTION the fact that a lot of these projects wouldn't have been funded otherwise. They might still have been made, but they would not be able to devote the same amount of attention to the project.

@DavidLejeune - true, that piece is quite mean-spirited. But I think he's at least right that a LOT of the people funding these things have higher expectations of what's going to come out than is going to be possible. When the first shots of Wasteland 2 come out and it looks like a game from 1998? How many of it's backers will demand money back cause they were expecting Fallout 3 for example? A lot of gaming kickstarter pitches I read are really vague. I don't think I've read one that convinces me they're definitely going to have something done at the end of it, and the DoubleFine one only gets some slack because of track record (they've put out three XBLA games in the past two years, that shows they know what they're doing).

I think these guys are going to find issues dealing with a community that is ALSO putting money in. Hell, we get enough abuse from our fans as it is (see earlier posts) and that's when they haven't actually put any money down up front. The backers are going to want a say in development. If you give it to them you'll have the worst case of design by comittee you'll ever see, and in gaming that never works. Anything I've worked on where there hasn't been a strong design vision from one or two guys has turned out pish.

I want it to work. I don't think it's going to. But I agree it's an interesting experiment and the first step along the road to who knows where?

@Flabyo: I sincerely doubt that anyone who threw money down on the Wasteland 2 kickstarter would even remotely desire it to look anything like Fallout 3, any more than anyone backing the Shadowrun kickstarter expects or wants a sequel to the FPS. At most they'll expect Fallout Tactics level graphics.

All of the huge kickstarter projects are big wet sloppy nostalgia blowjobs. The most contemporary thing, graphically, anyone will want out of them is a QSXVGA framebuffer, and maybe some anti-aliasing.

Flabyo- my only problem with people griping and wanting their money back is that Kickstarter isn't shy about saying what it is. It's not a pre-order for a product. It's not an investment. It's not giving the donators ownership, unless that's specifically spelled out in a rewards tier. It's a fundraising method to enable the creation of a product. If you donate for a specific tier then yes, you're owed that thing, but nobody has a right to complain if it turns out the final product is less than what they envisioned. Unless, of course, that product falls short of what was promised in the initial description.

It's a risk, donating to Kickstarter. If the fans don't understand this, they may want to learn to research first. It's every bit as important not to be dumb with one's money online as it is at the grocery store.